BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Geoffrey Hartman,
Scars
of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity.

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
xii + 260 pp. ISBN 0312295693.

Reviewed by Kevin Hart
The University of Notre Dame

"The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind." Hegelís
memorable sentence occurs in the Phenomenology of Spirit, toward
the end of a dense passage on the conscience. On his analysis,
the conscience is a dialectical advance on Kantís moral consciousness.
It is universal in form, like the categorical imperative, yet it makes
concrete moral decisions, and does so by responding to an inner voice
that it knows to be divine. Of course, the conscience can act
quite arbitrarily. It may suspend all action, and preserve itself
as a "Beautiful Soul," thereby condemning itself to impotence or even
madness. Such was an essential temptation of Romanticism, Hegel
thought. Insufferably self-righteous, the "Beautiful Soul" condemns
those who act, and -- because it does not realize that judgment is a
species of action -- falls into hypocrisy. The opposition of action
and judgment yields to a higher form of consciousness, one willing to
forgive. Before that happens, though, there must be a breaking
of "the hard heart," and it is this that wounds the spirit.

In its very title, Scars of the Spirit gathers together Romanticism
and ethics, religion and speculative philosophy. Of living literary
critics, Geoffrey Hartman is one of the very few who can negotiate these
four, produce an original meditation and maintain an individual voice.
The meditation, conducted over thirteen essays, centers on how we can
live authentic lives, as citizens and writers, in a world in which no
word has become less credible than "authentic." In a wide variety
of ways, the postmodern has made us uncomfortable with metaphors of
the genuine, the integral, the interior, the original, the real, the
self-sufficient and the transparent that are coiled inside the word
"authentic." Yet we continue to struggle against the inauthentic:
in our taste for autobiography and biography, in the appeal of gritty
realism on TV, video and the Internet, in our anxiety over imitation,
and in our care for fragments of a past that was, we like to believe,
lived more closely to the rhythms of the real than is possible for us
today.

If we distrust the word "authentic," we have long since lost all faith
in "Spirit." Modern history has taught us to beware those claiming
to be messiahs, in politics as well as religion, and to walk in fear
of "moral progress." Modern European philosophy has instructed
us, time and again, to look for what is repressed or suppressed in dialectical
syntheses; while the best contemporary criticism has shown us the dangers
of quickly passing from the letter to the spirit. "The spirit
does leave scars," Hartman points out, "both evident and eloquent. Nor
do the wounds beneath always heal" (41). Some of the most memorable
scars are the works of art that answer, in one way or another, to the
breaking of the "hard heart" that Hegel evokes. As in The Fateful
Question of Culture (1997), Hartman steadily points us to the achieved
work of art as something that resists being swept up in a philosophical
or religious rush of spirit or swept away by identity politics.
Cultural analyses are not made all the more authentic by retreating
from the aesthetic; rather, they become less convincing the less they
understand the aesthetic. The complexity we find in Wordsworth
or Yeats, Goethe or Valéry, enables us to respond more carefully
to ethical, political and religious questions.

Hartmanís position is not reactionary. There is no proposal to
return to a well-defined set of internal criteria of authenticity in
literary texts. The hope is far more modest: to free art from
"false standards of appreciation" (9) -- or lack of appreciation, one
might add. Nor is there a question of returning to the curriculum
and pedagogy of yesteryear: the study of literature has "to be reinforced
(rather than displaced) by TV, Internet, and film" (96). Cultural
studies do not offer a new paradigm for literary studies; but, once
their braggadocio has come to an end, they can be of assistance in deepening,
extending and ramifying the study of art. Certainly we need styles
of cultural criticism that can identify, analyze and even redirect our
life among images in postmodern times, and in these essays Hartman shows
himself to be a well-informed and humane guide.

In Scars of the Spirit, as in all his writing, Hartman is first
and foremost an essayist, with an appetite for the suggestive detail
and a taste for indirection. While his essays are quite different
in style and temper than Maurice Blanchotís, the French criticís concerns
press on Hartman more surely here than in his other recent work, and
his admiration of Blanchotís insights is evident at several important
points. Hartman agrees with Blanchot that, as the American puts
it, "writing is unable to reference its own authenticity" (22), though
the thought does not lead Hartman to the brink of the abyss, as it does
other readers of Blanchot. Instead, Hartman regards the gap between
writing and authenticity as a sustained call for critical commentary
of an incisive and creative kind. Literature asks us to take part
in a conversation with other readers, alive and dead, and a positive
response to the invitation has ethical as well as pedagogic value.
To set oneself in an "intergenerational conversation, together with
the art enfolded by it" can moderate "passions that turn the quest for
a grounding authority or a spiritual purpose into a ferocious weapon,
a transcendental violence" (23). Also, and more subtly, Hartman
responds to Blanchotís account of the imaginary, which is arguably at
the base of postmodern attunements to being.

Most accounts of the imaginary console us with the thought that the
real and the image belong to distinct and stable orders, that we can
measure the truth of an image against the real. In The Space
of Literature, however, Blanchot argues that the imaginary is within
a thing or, if you like, that the distance between a thing and
its image is always within the thing. On this understanding,
it is none other than being that subverts any attempt to compare the
real and the imaginary. Now ontological accounts of the image
are not new. One of them animates the anti-iconoclast cause in
the ninth century: St Theodore the Studite, for instance, maintained
that there would be no prototype if there were no image. But Blanchot
reverses the spin we associate with this ontological account of the
image -- divine being becomes absence -- and the ground for authenticity
begins to crumble. Once the ontological account of the image is
harnessed to tele-technology we find ourselves living in a world characterized
by a vast excess of image over experience. Blanchot is willing
to redefine "experience" so that it means a perilous exposure to the
absence at the heart of being. Yet Hartman stands aside, looking
elsewhere. Interested as he is in the twinning of literature and
philosophy, he likes to keep both feet on the ground. Neither
Baudrillard on the hyper-real nor Debord on the society of the spectacle
offers vistas that Hartman finds particularly rewarding. It is
the imbalance of experience and image that spawns postmodern inauthenticity,
he argues, and we cannot return to a world in which experience and image
are in harmony.

We might say that Hartman is an advocate of counter-spirit rather than
Spirit. I take the expression from the second of Wordsworthís
"Essays on Epitaphs," remembering that the author of The Unremarkable
Wordsworth (1987) remains an essential critic of that great poet.
"Language," Wordsworth says, "if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave
in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a
counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to
subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve." Although
he duly recognizes the darker forces of literary language, Hartman is
certainly no advocate for the demonic that Wordsworth associates with
"counter-spirit." He is closer to the counter-spirit at work (without
working) in Blanchotís The Writing of the Disaster: "a passivity
that cannot be spiritualized (interpreted as martyrdom, for example)
yet honors sheer endurance" (107). The letter constantly returns,
Hartman insists (with Lacan and Judaism forming the vanishing points
of his thought), and this return "produces a complex fidelity" that
he calls "a cure of meanings by the text" (117).

The struggle for authenticity takes place by way of counter-spirit,
by this textual cure of meanings. It can be found in Blanchotís
novel Thomas líobscur (1941) where we detect "a thereness, an
il y a, that wounds arrogance and undermines stability of meaning"
(117). Here the imaginary cures meaning. Elsewhere, the
cure is performed by technique. Hartman gives as an example his
work for the Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. In
retrospect, he tells us, the first testimonies were spoiled by some
irritating camera work. The camera would zoom in and out, "creating
Bergmanesque close-ups" (74). Thereafter the camera was required
to give up its capacity for expressive potential and remain, so far
as possible, fixed on the speakerís face. "In short, our technique,
or lack of it, was homeopathic: It used television to cure television,
to turn the medium against itself, limiting even while exploiting its
visualizing power" (75).

No poem or film can evade the possibility of a transcendent reading.
Hartman knows that a movement from letter to spirit is inevitable and
even desirable. We might suspend hermeneutics in favor of poetics for
a while but not for ever: the human mind feeds on meaning. Good
reading is not a matter of remaining eternally in the realm of the letter;
it is a question of knowing how to trace the detours and returns that
occur in the inevitable passage from letter to spirit, of recognizing
that transcendence is a part of complexity and not an escape from it.
Good reading is always slow reading: it cures meaning by attending closely
to the text. It takes us "beyond formalism," to be sure, but it
never jettisons formalism.